


Twisted Promise

by Nitrobot



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime, Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Major Character Injury, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Parasites, Possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-01 19:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17249720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nitrobot/pseuds/Nitrobot
Summary: You know the drill by now; Elita One stranded on Archa Seven, is injured, gets turned into a spider robot, blah blah, same old script.This time is a little different, though. This time, Airachnid is her own kind of character.Or should I say, her own kind of parasite.(It's a Venom crossover for a reason, folks).





	Twisted Promise

**Author's Note:**

> Some of you might've read my most well-known fic Promise.  
> This is like that but a lot shorter and with a lot more angst and blatant stealing from the Venom movie. Enjoy.
> 
>  
> 
> Also happy new year

Elita One had felt pain before. She was a commander, after all. It was her job, her duty, to bear the burden of all the soldiers under her. A leader who didn’t suffer with those who followed them was no leader at all. That was what Optimus had told her, when he received the Matrix. That was what made her decide to bond with him.

But this wasn’t just pain. 

She couldn’t move.

She couldn’t even see. Not her HUD, not the light that should have come from her optics, not her hand that she swore she was waving in front of her. 

She… she could feel her glossa. Like a dry slab on the bottom of her jaw, weighing it down, straining the joint that bolted it to her face. It twitched once, then flailed like a beached Sharkticon, clicking against her denta that were thankfully still intact.

...Thankfully? Why would they have been broken? Was that why her mouth felt so… sticky? Like she’d stuffed a whole pallet of Energel in there. Or… like she’d been bleeding. She had been. She could taste her own energon, bitter. Cold. Cold in her spark. Cold all over.

Something had happened. Something had knocked her offline, and restarting all her processes was a lot harder than it should have been. Elita blinked, and she only knew she had when her HUD floated on the edges of her vision, framing the darkness around her in a sterile blue glow that only she could see. 

Blue to let her know she was still alive… red to tell her all the things that were still killing her.

 

[ SYSTEMS REPORT: CRITICAL ]

[ SPARK TEMPERATURE EXCEEDING SAFE RANGE ]

[ ERROR CASCADE: SEE SYSTEMS.LOG() FOR FULL DETAILS ]

 

Error cascade. She couldn’t decipher the language of her own ailing body, but she at least knew what that meant. If she didn't get to a medic soon, she was seriously fragged. Was there a medic nearby? Her team… First Aid was with them. He could fix her. She just needed to find them… to remember who she’d been with before she fell. 

 

“Chromia…?” Her own voice sounded foreign, her glossa still numb and clumsy as she tried to force it to make words out of the rusty groans from her vocaliser. There was a distant answer… or so she thought, before she realised she was only hearing her own hollow echo. It reverberated off of her frame, amplifying the whispers of agony into high-pitched hisses. 

 

“Arcee?” The second time wasn’t so bad, but she still winced at hearing how… weak she sounded. And how far the echo travelled. If no one heard it, then she was truly alone.

There was another warning, buried in her backlog, dated just a breem ago. When she was still offline? With no other clues to look at, she examined it.

 

[ WARNING: POSSIBLE VIRUS DETECTED

RECOMMENDED ACTION: FULL SYSTEM QUARANTINE ]

 

Quarantine… that was what had put her into stasis. Her subsystems were running through their extensive diagnostics first before they let themselves boot up, one by one. That’s all it was. 

Standard procedure for flushing out viruses. 

How long had it been running for? How long had  _ she  _ been running for, with an infection rooted so deep in her systems that no one had noticed until it made her drop? Unless… something else made her shut down. 

But what? She wouldn’t find the answer lying flat on her aft. So, knowing full well that First Aid and Ratchet and every other medic in the Autobots’ ranks would be cursing her stupidity, she made herself sit up as soon as her servos allowed her to move them. She recognised what she felt under her digits- or thought she did, at least. Rock. Stone. Something rough and scraping against the steel of her hand, so unlike the ores that formed the foundations of Cybertron. 

Because this wasn’t Cybertron.

This was… Archa Seven. Elita remembered. Organic. Trees. Chromia complaining about having to cut down branches and webs and… and then the Decepticons came. 

Red optics. Red lights. More red than blue, just like with her HUD. If there were any others still around, they might’ve heard her echoes, might’ve been coming right towards her.

She had to move. No matter how much it hurt, how much more damage she did to herself, she had to go somewhere else.  _ Anywhere _ else.

After Elita managed to drag herself upright, taking in her stony surroundings, she forced herself forward. Walking was possible. Not easy, but she wasn’t allowed to see that as a concern. All that mattered was that she found her way out of here… or at least someone who could get her out. She didn’t even try testing if her blasters were usable, not when she doubted she had enough fuel to power them, but her blade at least emerged from her servo on command. Now knowing she had a weapon on hand, she felt a little braver about drawing attention to herself.

“Can… can anyone hear me?” 

She didn’t expect anyone to answer. She actually hoped no one would, so she didn’t have to worry about falling into a trap.

So when she heard the voice echo in her head, she almost knocked herself out again.

**“I can.”**

Elita jumped, and banged her helm on the roof of the tunnel. As a whole new source of pain pounded in her head, so did the voice. And so did her confusion. There was no one nearby, no EM fields crackling against hers or fizzling on the edge of her awareness… yet it sounded like someone was right next to her. Not just someone, it was… her own voice. Her own echo, but as if its natural frequencies had been torn apart and stitched back together into something guttural and  _ wrong _ .

“Who said that...?!”

When it spoke again, it sounded even closer.

**“Behind you.”**

Her helm snapped to her left, as if yanked by an invisible string hooked deep into her neck. There in the dark, given away by its own crimson biolights...

A Decepticon. Vehicon, specifically. But that wasn’t a drone’s stock voice in her audios. But that definitely  _ was  _ a drone just noticing her as she noticed it, aiming his gun, powering it up with a loud hum that filled the chamber-

Elita rolled to one side, the only evasive maneuver she could manage without her legs buckling beneath her. Rock showered down on her from the volley of blasts that chewed right through the wall where she’d standing just a nanoklick ago, and she knew the drone would need several more to see where she was once the dust cleared and adjust its aim accordingly. A thousand countermeasures flashed across her closed optics- charging the drone, knocking it over, sweeping its legs out and turning the gun on itself- but as she sat crouched there in the cloud of grit she… she felt something,  _ several  _ things bulge out of her back. They weren’t heavy. She only noticed because she felt them pull on her protoform as they emerged, as if that invisible string was being pulled again to drag her across the room. She managed to resist it, but then it was gone. Dissolved back into her broken body. The hum of the blaster’s power was gone, too. All she heard was a disturbing gurgle, and an impatient frizzling beneath it. Now she was much slower to look behind her.

The drone was on the ground, covered in neon from holes pierced all over its chestplate. They were leaking. Gushing. The crackle of electricity was from whatever it had in place of a spark. The energon was bright. Pulsing. Leaking. 

Gushing.

The drone was twitching. 

**The prey was dying.**

Fuel.  **Food** . 

So much of it.  **So much of it.**

...Her mouth was bleeding again.

No. No, that wasn’t her own energon. 

The drone’s servo was in her mouth. Her denta lodged in the metal, glossa soaking up the fuel that dripped out. It tasted sweet. 

**Sweet.**

She watched it ooze from the wound, from the arm that was snatched out of her grip. There was a screech of metal on stone as the drone scrambled back, leaving more of itself behind in a glowing trail, using the last of its strength just to get away from her. 

**How pathetic.**

How it cowered, shivering and chirping its last sounds like a sparkling desperate for its carrier… it was as if she was a monster.

Elita choked, spluttering up the energon before it could reach her tanks. Retching, purging, spitting up the neon and the black specks swimming around in the sludge. Dead metal still lodged in her denta, in her… fangs. She felt them under her glossa while it washed the sticky residue from her mouth, then under her digits. 

She looked at the drone again, at the gouges she’d made in its servo, and it was finally dead.

**“You’re letting it go to waste, Elita.”**

Elita jumped again, flinching and scurrying to flatten herself against the nearest wall. She knew where the voice was coming from, yet… she couldn’t see it there. Not until the shadows started to bubble in front of her, the black in her vomit being pulled across the floor to join the apparition hovering there before her optics. It shimmered like some kind of event horizon, warping and dragging itself across the air until it formed… a face. Pink optics glittered at her below a jagged black crown of horns and above a graveyard of fangs. In those optics, Elita didn’t see her own reflected. 

“What the Pit are you…?”

**“I am Airachnid,”** the void answered in her own corrupted voice.  **“And you… are mine.”**

Elita gulped, trying to ignore the lingering taste of stolen energon in her throat. It was the only thing she  _ could  _ ignore. The black ooze in front of her was anchored to her own body. It  _ came  _ from her. It was… it was inside her.

This was the virus she’d been warned about. This was the Klyntar that had curbed Cybertron’s expansion during its Empire days. She remembered Optimus talking about them, when he was still Orion. Only one of the many things that stopped the old Emperor Deathsaurus from trying to take over the whole galaxy, a footnote on Orion’s beloved archives. Elita didn’t remember much of what he’d described… but she knew another name for them.

“You’re a symbiote.” She trembled, and Airachnid grinned. She doubted it could do much else with so many teeth. She  _ hoped  _ it couldn’t.

**“Correct. And you are a Cybertronian.”** Airachnid’s black overflowed her eyes, narrowing them as it angled its head around Elita. Examining her while it swarmed in her protoform.  **“My kind always found bonding to your species... difficult. But you were so close to death, there was nothing in my way. You could say I seized the opportunity that your body presented.”**

Elita struggled to listen. She only heard one word, one word that throbbed behind her optics and sparked in her circuits.

Bonding…? Bonding to her? 

Symbiotes were parasites. She remembered. That’s why they caused planet-wide quarantines. They couldn’t live without feeding off of a host, and everything else around it...

“No. No.” Elita was shaking her head, yet the symbiote didn’t budge. “No, no, no, I am Elita  _ One _ ! One, as in, only me! Not Elita  _ Two _ !” 

**“I’d suggest making some room. I don’t plan on leaving.”**

“Get out of me. Get out of me right fragging now, or I will cut you out myself!” She still had her blade. If she could find where the symbiote infected her, cut in deep enough to force it out-

**“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”** The blade came out, and it was encased in the same black ooze that was speaking to her. Elita wiped it off, flinging away the slime that coated her digits.

“Well, you’re not me,” she growled. “You never  _ will _ be me. You’re a  _ parasite _ , and you are leaving my body right-!”

She had the weapon poised against her chest, ready to carve between her armour plates if she needed to, but another face bubbled up between them. The same one from before, flitting in and out of her body like she was an airlock.

**“I could leave, if you really want me to.** ” Airachnid was still grinning, and Elita felt cold digits start to seize her inner mechanisms, telling her what the symbiote would take with it.  **“But then, one by one, your subsystems will start failing. Then your fuel pump. The energon will sit stagnant in your fuel lines, curdling and hardening until it clogs your veins and cracks them open. And by then, your spark will have cut out. If you’re lucky, your processor might go first. If not… you’ll have to feel every single step of your death. The death that only I am keeping away.”**

Airachnid pulled itself closer to Elita’s helm as it went through the steps of death, forcing her to face it with all her horror. With the damage report that she’d woken up to… the symbiote was right. She should have been dead. 

She was starting to wish that she was. 

“What have you done to me…?”

**“I saved you. And if I leave... you die. Simple as that.”**

Elita looked down at her chest again, at the scarred plating. At her servo, no longer armed. She didn’t remember retracting her blade...

“What do you  _ want _ ?”

**“Don’t look so scared, Elita. All I want is to be fed.”** Airachnid swivelled its head aside, so now Elita was looking at the drone they’d just killed laying slumped against the wall. Still leaking fuel that made her tanks groan even as she gulped down acid. 

“No. I’m not… I’m not doing that.”

**“Yes, I understand your revulsion… I much prefer to eat while they’re still alive.”** Airachnid hissed at the body before turning the hive of its eyes back onto its current victim.  **“No matter. Your body, as… broken and pitiful as it is, will do just fine to sustain me. For now.”**

Elita forced herself to stand up now, though she didn’t know how much of her movements were from her own nerves and how much was the symbiote puppeting her. All she knew was exactly what she knew before.

She had to move.

No matter how much it hurt. No matter how much she wanted to peel herself apart just so the symbiote couldn’t use her. She had to go somewhere else. Away from here, away from anyone else who might find her and her parasite. Away from...

**“Who is Optimus?”**

“Get out of my head.” Elita hissed, and was taken aback by how loud her glossa was. But her peds didn’t falter, not even when she walked past the Vehicon’s tempting corpse.

**“Fine.”** She felt Airachnid physically slip down her spinal strut, settling in a much more dangerous place. **“I’ve already seen all that I need to… yes, I see. You need to return to him.”**

“I don’t,” she lied. “I… I’m not bringing  _ you  _ anywhere near him.”

**“Then where will you go?”**

“Away from here. Away… away from anyone you might hurt.”

**“I won’t hurt anyone, Elita.”**

She snorted, almost actually laughing despite everything. Did this thing so quickly forget the drone they’d killed? “Bullslag. I’ve heard what Klyntar can do. Your kind… they can devour entire planets.” Not at all different to the Decepticons. Primus, she had a  _ Decepticon  _ in her head…! 

**“Not by myself,”** Airachnid argued, either not knowing what a Decepticon was or not caring. **“But we… us together…. yes, we could do that.”**

Elita stopped, and found her claws digging into her palms. When she released them, she found the energon leaking out of them was the same black and blue mottle she’d coughed up. In the blue, she saw her reflection for the first time.

Pink optics over her shoulder, pink armour under the grime.

Pink was just a different shade of red.

“I will not let you turn me into one of them,” she hissed again.

**“Seems to me like you don’t really have a choice,”** her reflection said. 

An argument was on her lips, but there it stayed when she heard a voice that wasn’t in her own head for once.

“Elita? Elita One?”

Optimus. It was Optimus, her sparkmate, her beloved, his summons booming off the walls all around her. Impossible to tell how close or far he was, but… but that shouldn’t have been. She should have felt him approaching. She should have been able to sense him across light years, a familiar and warm link anchored eternally to her spark, and yet…

And yet when she searched there, she found nothing. As if the bond wasn’t there, simply erased. She hadn’t even noticed it until now.

Had her spark been so damaged, so irreparable before Airachnid, that it could no longer hold their sacred bond? 

She was going to be sick again. 

**“Your friends are here to rescue you,”** Airachnid said, completely apathetic to its host’s anguish. Friends… it was right. Optimus wasn’t the only one approaching. Elita didn’t know how she could feel them, but they were coming. 

“And you’re going to kill them all,” she choked.

**“Only if they make us.”**

Elita was stranded. Not just on Archa Seven, but stranded in her own spark, in her own body that was no longer her own. All she’d wanted was to see her friends, the bots she loved and the mech she adored, yet she had no idea what her body would do if they came too close.

Even though the bond was no longer there, she still felt her spark breaking with every step she took away from Optimus’ pleading calls. 

**“We’re going the wrong way,”** Airachnid said.

“No, we’re not.” Elita whispered so only they… only the parasite could hear her. It was getting difficult to see it as something that wasn’t also her. She wasn’t going to get used to this. But she saw that as a good thing, 5he  _ only  _ good thing, as she dragged them both away from her family. 

They were still calling for her. Chromia, Arcee, both of them joining Optimus’ pleading for her to be alright…

She could hear them, even through the rock that pressed down all around her. Just as she knew how slowly they were walking through the tunnels, leaving no stone unturned. The symbiote was enhancing her senses somehow. As if to torture her with what she had to give up.

“Are you sure she’s around here?” Arcee was asking.

“This is where the ground caved in,” Chromia hissed back, “so where else is she gonna be?!”

“It’s just… well, you know what Ratchet said. If her spark signal isn’t online, then-”

“I know what it means, Arcee. Optimus does as well. But we have to at least try to find her. Even… even if it’s just to bring her body back.”

They thought she was dead. If her bond was gone, then it made sense her signal couldn’t be found either. 

Good. It meant they wouldn’t try to follow her.

**“There’s that name again,”** Airachnid noted, eavesdropping on some part of Elita’s mind again.  **“Optimus… are you so sure you want to leave him behind?”**

“I have to. Until I find a way to get you out of me.”

**“You’re being very ungrateful, Elita. But… I am generous. And I’m willing to make a deal with you.”**

Elita stopped. She had to, with Airachnid pulling hard on the brakes. “A deal?”

The symbiote emerged again, dragging a thick glossa across its fangs to wipe away drool. “ **I can take us away from here,”** it teased. **“Light years away, where they will never find us. Just do as I say, and you will live long enough to see your Optimus again.”**

Elita could have seen him right then. All she had to do was turn around, run back to where she knew he was, where her friends were waiting.

She could have… but would he have wanted to see her like this? She wasn’t a sparkmate anymore, after all. And he had a war to win. A planet, their home, to protect. 

She was a threat. And if needed… he would neutralise her. She trusted him to. And if he didn’t, he’d never forgive himself for the massacre he’d bring home.

“...I  _ will _ see him again?” Elita prayed, but she suspected Primus wanted nothing to do with the creature inside of her. Airachnid’s mouth went even wider, and this time it truly was grinning.

**“I promise.”**

She doubted it even knew the meaning of the word. But she didn’t have time to argue. The Autobots were too close now. She had to keep moving before they caught up to her, and now Airachnid insisted on taking charge. Elita did not walk. She was a passenger, being pulled through the tunnels and into further and further darkness, into places the symbiote was surely familiar with. The voices dwindled until they were gone, and Elita squeezed her optics before coolant started to flood out. 

She felt pathetic enough as it was, but even more so when she felt her body stop once more and found herself standing before a cold funeral pyre. 

The bodies weren’t Cybertronian, yet their skeletons were similar enough to metal. Hard, cracked chitin and skulls with a hundred tiny sockets for eyes that rotted away long ago.

Giant spiders. The apex predator of Archa Seven, before the Decepticons invaded. Elita had seen plenty of live ones since they’d landed.

**“Previous hosts,”** Airachnid explained. **“Don’t mind them.”**

Elita desperately tried not to. “Just… get me out of here.”

**“You mean, get** **_us_ ** **out of here.”** Airachnid chuckled to itself as it infested her back, forming the same jagged growths that had stabbed the Vehicon. Now that Elita could feel them lifting her up, she realised they were like legs. Spider legs, like the very same ones scattered amongst the corpses like twigs. Then the corpses blurred together with the stone walls of the tunnel, and there was a whirr from all around her. Airachnid had turned them both into a drill, the legs spinning rapidly to chew through the solid rock beneath them as if it was fabric. Wherever they emerged, Elita didn’t care. She might have at some point, but that point was as far behind her as her intact spark.


End file.
